The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2021

Happy 2022!

And as we close the chapter on 2021, there are plenty of hard-won lessons to take with us into a brand-new year. Here on The Review, we have an annual tradition to help turn the page — we comb through every single article we published the previous year, and parse each one to extract the most impactful tactics and key takeaways we can't stop thinking about, one year on. Today, we're pleased to present our ninth edition of this highly-anticipated list.

Amid a flurry of content out there — including long tweet threads, LinkedIn "broetry" and Substack newsletters — here on The Review, our goal is not to chase trends, but to publish the type of company-building advice that stands the test of time and that you can return to again and again. When we launched the Review back in 2013, one of the three promises we made was that every article would “serve up tactics that you can use today to change your company and your career.”

While the advice is evergreen, if you sift through all the articles on the Review this past year, a few themes stood out. It wouldn’t be a 2021 retrospective without a nod to the “Great Resignation” — folks up and down the org chart are reconsidering their career goals and sizing up the gaps that may stand in their way. Along those lines, we’ve published tips for ICs to take charge of their own careers, tapped a therapist for her take on making self-care tactical, and tested ideas for upping your management game.

That same itch pushed many others to consider becoming a founder for the first time. This past year, we got the chance to pluck lessons for first-time founders straight from entrepreneurs in the trenches, with a particular focus on the messy pre-product/market fit phase of startup building.

A few of these fuzzy topics, like becoming a better manager, self-care, or staring down the gulf of creating a company from scratch can seem amorphous. In our annual retrospective, we look for the most tactical, super-specific ideas from The Review’s pages last year. With that in mind, here are the standout pieces of advice we heard in 2021. We hope you can apply them to start the year off on the right foot — and carry that momentum through 2022.

-The Review Editors

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